3 crucial customer health metrics you should monitor to prevent churn

Jenny Campbell

|

VP of Customer Experience

of

DiscoverOrg

Jenny Campbell

Episode Summary

Today on Churn.fm we have Jenny Campbell, Vice President of Customer Experience at DiscoverOrg.

In this episode, we discussed the functions of customer marketing inside a customer success team; three essential things that move the customer retention needle; and how to define your customer segments.

We also talked about DiscoverOrg's systematic approach when it comes to customer onboarding, how they continuously iterate the onboarding process, and how they measure the impact and effectiveness.

Jenny also shared unique insights on the challenges she faced when DiscoverOrg acquired and merged with their competitors, and how DiscoverOrg "eats their own dog food" by using their own product for sales, marketing, and customer success.

As usual, I'm excited to hear what you think of this episode, and if you have any feedback, I would love to hear from you. You can email me directly on Andrew@churn.fm. Don't forget to follow us on Twitter.

Highlights

The three things that move the needle in terms of customer retention and improving customer health levels

00:07:13

How to define the customer segmentations

00:09:53

The typical onboarding process for larger companies

00:12:55

How DiscoverOrg design their customer success touchpoints

00:20:53

How DiscoverOrg improve their onboarding process through continuous learning

00:25:47

How to measure the impact and effectiveness of the onboarding process

00:26:39

The customer renewal process at DiscoverOrg

00:28:00

The biggest challenge in dealing with acquisition mergers and fast-growing headcount

00:35:27

How DiscoverOrg “eaten their own dog food”

00:38:17

What Jenny would do to help a company turn its churn around

00:40:59

One thing that Jenny wish she can do today related to churn and retention

00:44:34

Transcription

Andrew MichaelHi, Jenny. Welcome to the show.

Jenny CampbellThank you so much for having me, Andrew, happy to be here.

Andrew MichaelIt's great to have you. For the listeners. Jenny is currently the VP of Customer Experience at DiscoverOrg, a sales intelligence tool that helps sales people find highly qualified leads and then provides them with all the details needed to contact them. Discover org is experienced explosive growth has also recently made the acquisition of the biggest competitor zoom info, seen 40% year on year growth doing well North now of 300 million in ARR. And Jamie has been with the company through this growth that she started out as the director of demand generation, followed by the Senior Director of customer marketing, and now currently as a role as VP of customer experience. So, Jenny, looking at your career to date, you've had predominantly held marketing roles. what triggered the jump to customer experience?

Jenny CampbellYeah, absolutely. So yeah, I had historically been in marketing roles, you know, marketing management roles, demand Gen roles. When I joined discover org In the fall of 2016. And I was hired as the director of demand Gen. Customer marketing actually was under that umbrella. Strangely enough, I had, I had been interested in the company based on a couple of customer marketing role because it was marketing at Jason and ended up being a damn bro of demand Gen. So for my first year of so customer marketing was just part of that role. And as the company grew so much in that year, we realized that that actually, the customer marketing function needed to be spun out completely, because it required a full team. And it just didn't make sense for it to live under the demand Gen umbrella anymore. So I was given the option and I chose to stick with the customer marketing side. Because it was a new challenge for me. I had loved building that team over the past year, and getting more entrenched with our customers figuring out, you know, what makes our customers successful? How do we have healthy happy customers that continue to renew and be advocates for us. And so I was really excited about the idea of continuing to build that team and being focused exclusively on the customer side of the house.

Andrew MichaelInteresting stuff like so me can just let us know a little bit just for context sec, how many employees how many teams members are there and discover org at this time. So let's say now things have changed with the acquisition. But when you made this breakout and you had a dedicated team?

Jenny CampbellYeah, so it's even evolved, since it actually does what I just described to you. But I discovered was about a 500 person company, until we acquired zoom info, which was in early February of this year. So we we almost doubled or we did double in size overnight going from a 500 person company to 1000 person company in that transition. And zoom info actually had a much larger marketing team than we did. So some of the functions got absorbed, there were only three customer marketing folks at the time of acquisition. Since then, I actually no longer oversee customer marketing that got folded under the larger marketing umbrella at zoom info, which is a team of, oh gosh, I would say probably 25 or 30 folks now. And then they have about five customers marketing. So we spun off once again, due to the acquisition where I took on the more customer experience focus and customer marketing was actually folded in as a like in their standard marketing organization. So we've sort of come full circle on, on, on, on customer marketing, the idea. And the reason that customer marketing existed in customer experience for the time that it did is when we when we thought about our customer base and retention of our customer base, we tried to think about what are the key leading indicators that keep healthy, happy customers that were new, right? Are they actually using the platform to the point where they're getting the business results? And they want to advocate for you? Are they going through the right training so that they get can get to that level of adoption and usage? And are they integrating our data with us as that they already have in place things like Salesforce and Marketa and HubSpot outreach and those other systems. And so we brought those teams together under the customer experience umbrella. So it was customer marketing, or learning and development and training teams and our integrations teams, as a group to fully focus on pushing those leading indicators that we knew really important for renewal.

Andrew MichaelOkay, so maybe like took us through the function then of customer marketing? So, like, in a typical companies, what sort of the focus areas were was it more like trying to drive sales? Or was it really looking at that adoption and how to drive adoption, according to men. So

Jenny Campbellthere's, there's there's three buckets, there's certainly the upsell bucket, right, supporting the, the customer revenue teams on things like upsell campaigns and stuff like that. There's the adoption component, so making sure that our customers are actually utilizing the platform. And then there is the advocacy. So on our content, our marketing team, we actually have folks focused on those three specific areas. So you know, they're different team members focused on those three areas under the customer marketing umbrella, so upsell, adoption and advocacy.

Andrew MichaelAnd I said, they're not getting from the sounds of a digital, then you spend some of your time thinking about the challenges of retention and churn. What are some of the early things that you realized within this team that really helped and move the needle on it?

Jenny CampbellYeah, so we had done some going on probably 18 or 24 months now, we had done some retention modeling to try to figure out and hone in on the factors that we think determine or not that we think that we prove out to determine if a customer actually renews or not because we have customers that range from very small SMB companies to very large enterprises that come to us and by discover Oregon's you medical, for a variety of reasons. And so we have customers that span, you know, the whole gamut as far as size and need. And, and when we were looking at their customers, we were, we were realizing that they, they retain at different rates. And there are factors that could determine how they retain for each of those segments. And so we started looking at some of the, the, what we now call leading indicators of whether we think the company of a certain size is likely to renew or not, and the three things that really rose, two things really in particular, that should not be a surprise to anyone, right? usage and adoption, are they actually using using a platform? So, you know, are all of their you know, they they purchased 100 user licenses, how many of those hundred users are actually logging in on a regular basis and doing activities and exporting data, and things like that. And then the other thing that was also very, that was revealed that should not be surprising is are they integrated? So, you know, we have a Salesforce native application. So are they using that native application? Do they have our data running through their other go to market systems, Marquette Oh, HubSpot outreach, those types of systems. And so of course, those, those customers that did that work were much, much stickier. And so and then we also knew that customers that had gone through training and onboarding and an ideal way, ultimately ended up having more usage and adoption. And so those teams that focused on those activities were actually disparate through the company learning and development was rolling up through finance. And we had integrations rolling up to customer success. And so what we did was we brought all those teams together, and, and we said, okay, this is now the customer experience team. And they are exclusively focused on impacting what we now know to be the leading indicators of renewal. And that's, are they integrated? Are they trained? And are they what is their usage healthy?

Andrew MichaelAnd so you did that sort of analysis? Taking a look back at you said it was about 12 to 18? months? Yeah. And then, so how, like, did you sort of define the buckets in the beginning? So you mentioned like, the different company sizes? So what was the the idea behind that? Was there any sort of obvious patterns that you saw?

Jenny CampbellYeah, the way that we have, the way that we look at our customer segments, and we have for the past couple years, and frankly, has worked really well for us is, we first looked at the size, are you and we have buckets to determine whether you're categorized an SMB or mid market or an enterprise, right? You have, you know, up to 50 or 100 employees 100 to 1000 and 1000. Plus, we first look at that, what size company, are you? And then we actually look at your growth rates. So how fast are you adding headcount? Did you get any recent funding, things like that, and we sub segment based on their growth rates, and then we have team structured to support those customer segments. So if I am an account manager, or a customer success manager, all the accounts in my opinion, fully OR like right there all, SB or mid market, our enterprise customers that are in similar stages of growth or growing at similar rates. So it really helps our supporting teams be able to come experts in how to best manage those customers.

Andrew MichaelAnd then within those sort of segments do go to me, like more granular to try and take a look at the different types of roles. Do you see like any specific an imagined as well, like the teaching at a company account with more sales people might be a little bit more of a stickier use case or?

Jenny CampbellAbsolutely, absolutely. So our customers within those segments and sub segments, to your point have different use cases. In some cases, they're using us on their sales team. And even that has a bunch of different ways that they might be using this right, they might just have some Field Sales, people that are out in the field and need company and contact data sort of on the fly, or they might be needing data to drive. You know, inside sales activities are managing inbound and outbound. So we have we look at what is their use case, right? Are they a sales user? Or are they a marketing users, or a marketing use case, I should say, so a marketing department is using us their use cases much different, right, they're building out campaigns and using us for their lead gen activities, they might be keeping their marketing automation systems clean with our data, so their use cases different. And then we actually have a lot of HR and recruiting use cases as well. So companies, you know, internal recruiting departments, or even agencies that are using our data to actually find in place candidates. And so we have to, we have to be able to service all those customers, this is where customer marketing team really comes in to help us support right developing best practices for each of those use cases, so that we can best help our customers get the most out of the data.

Andrew MichaelAnd not nice. So maybe you could walk us through that then a little bit more. So you said let's take the segment with roughly 100 licenses. But what would a typical onboarding process look like for a company of that size? Were you trying to onboard 100 people onto the organization? Like, what would your typical team be doing? What are some of the activities you try to be around with these customers to try and get them integrated and activated?

Jenny CampbellAbsolutely, absolutely. So our sales cycles, depending can be relatively short, we do try to collect as much information as we can during the sales cycle around certainly, you know, use case was your tech stack look like my team's really kicked into place, the second the deal is sold. So if we think about I'll walk you through kind of our, our optimal onboarding for a customer that has just purchased 100 licenses, and maybe their you know, their sales group, and they want to use it for sales purposes. So the new business side of the house, so think about a typical account executive actually closes the deal, literally immediately. So you know, within the hour, they are introduced to a customer success manager, that from that point on is their main point of contact. So you are now a customer may get a call from the customer success manager, usually within 10 or 15 minutes to, you know, welcome them to the discovered Lehman for family, and start to talk them through what onboarding looks like, they may have had some preview of that during the sales process, but you can imagine, you know, sales people, they want to get the deal closed. And if I don't spend a ton of time talking about what the onboarding process looks like, unless, unless the customer is asked for it. So we try to make it really clear for the customers second, they come on board, this is what that's what this is going to look like. We start with a kickoff call. And this is usually with just our main points of contact at the customer. So sometimes that's one person, right? It could be the VP of sales, or it could be a handful of folks. And we spend an hour going through things with the customer things like, you know, what are their business goals? What are they trying to accomplish? Why did they buy discover work in the first place, some of them might say, you know, our conversion rates are low, or you know, our SD, ours are only setting 10 demo today. And we need them to be setting 30 demos a day, whatever those business objectives are. So we kind of walk through that we walk through what did your tech stack look like? What tools are you using to use Salesforce use Mark Hedo we we get an understanding of their tech stack, and we get an understanding of their use case which teams are actually going to be using the service. And, you know, what are those teams trying to to accomplish, and we document and capture all that information. At the end of the kickoff call, we want to set them up with next steps. And the next step for a customer about size would be an integration call with our integrations team. So we have a specialized centralized team of integration folks. And they will get on the phone with that customer and help them do all the mapping in their sales force or set up their mark Hedo together, get them integrated if they have something in their tech stack that we actually integrate with. And then as soon as that's complete, they go through training. So we have a learning and development team that is also broken out based on segments. So you know, if you are in a mid market customer, you will end up with a mid market training team that handles your onboarding and training. So at that point, all the users are invited to a live training session where the learning and development manager would actually walk through, you know, this is how you use the platform, I know this is what you're actually trying to accomplish the platform and shows them you know, kind of the the nuts and bolts really in that first hour as a starting point. So that almost immediately, our customers can be up and running. In fact, when a customer gets signed, their users can be provisioned and within a couple of hours. So you know soon as we we get the completed agreement, we go ahead and provision that customer that their users can start accessing the platform maybe a couple days later, until they actually get trained, and feel comfortable using it. But we we try to get customers up and running as soon as possible. We do have a goal for our internal teams of getting every customer on boarded within 30 days, which means they had a kickoff call, they got integrated, they went through training and they have they have achieved some basic, you know, some basic usage patterns, I would say most customers get on boarded much faster than then 30 days, but 30 days is our goal.

Andrew MichaelAnd your specific reason why you selected 30 days is the goal.

Jenny CampbellAnd we find that most of our customers, you know they want to get up and running as soon as possible. It helps keep everybody on track, you know, we're starting to look at the metrics like you know, what is there, you know, speed and time to adoption and value. One of the things that we're really trying to focus on lately is we all has what we have already renewed focus on it is just, you know, really understanding what our customers are expecting to get from their investment, and helping them get there as soon as possible. So when I sit in a kickoff call, we really dive into what are your business goals and objectives, our customer success team is constantly circling back on those to make sure that everything is in place and on track for them to actually achieve that. And part of that means that we want to get them up and running and using a platform as soon as possible. After 30 days, then we launch into additional training, we have a full University there and constantly contact with their customer success manager, those types of things, so that we can continue to push them further down the path, but we want them to be, you know, really up and running and using the platform within those first 30 days.

Andrew MichaelYeah, and I'll send them so as well, you said you his first introductory call, you're trying to really understand what the business goals are. And you're documenting all this? What sort of tools are you using to document this? How do you enforce like the follow up? And how are you sort of using that information throughout your customers? lifecycle?

Jenny CampbellAbsolutely, yes. So we, we documented until into we built a bunch of custom objects in Salesforce. And we document we have, you know, a kickoff object and a trading object. And so we document those things in Salesforce and it actually auto generates an email that fires directly to the customer. As soon as that call is done to that set that says, you know, here's what we heard you say, this is what we know what you want to accomplish is what your tech stack looks like, here is our plan for success. So it hasn't stress. You know, this is what, what we think you need to be doing right now this is how we're going to help you get there. And this is what our relationship is going to look like going forward. We internally we call it a card. But it's really just a customer onboarding document. And it's like, it's a way for us to officially communicate the customer that we are understand what they're trying to accomplish. And we are partners to help them get there. And we have a plan for doing so we then continuously circled back on that information. So the customer success team is really tasked with circling back with those customers at you know, 30 days, 90 days or more often, you know, depending on on the needs of the customer, to make sure that everything is on track as far as them achieving the business results that they set out to. So we also manage that in Salesforce, we have another custom object called touch points that helps us manage, you know, is the customer actually on track based on what we know they're trying to accomplish. So we use the heck out of Salesforce with a bunch of a bunch of custom objects that allow us to have a real time view of customer health and happiness.

Andrew MichaelNice. And then so you're monitoring that throughout you say like the the CS rep is trying to reach out whenever the customer needed. They need regular intervals, where you reaching out as checkpoints to like, check in with the goals and see how your customers are doing. Do you have anything as a systematic approach? Or? It's more lately? Yeah.

Jenny CampbellAbsolutely. Yeah. So we we we strive for some some touch points, obviously, in addition to those touch points, there might be others. But a couple of them are things like as soon as they complete training, right? We need to check in with them to make sure okay, how was training? Did you get what you needed from training did all your users get trained, if not, let's make sure that we get those users trained. So there's initial steps and checkpoints that occur in onboarding or call it the first 30 days, sometimes training takes place in the first seven days. So we want to make sure they got everything up everything they need from training. And then, you know, the customer success managers are wired to check in with the customers at least once every 60 days in a formal way. So that means that there's two and two way engagement with a customer. And we're able to, you know, when we hang up the phone with that customer, the customer success manager should know if the customer is happy, unhappy, neutral, you know, so that we can make a plan there. And then we also do SD ours with our customers, depending on what size of the customer, we do one to two strategic business reviews with that with customers as well. And those are conducted by our customer success managers.

Andrew MichaelVery nice. And like I saw that you said used to do like a pulse check, because that was going to be my next question in terms of like happiness and our satisfied customers, or how do you go about measuring the impact and the effectiveness of the onboarding process with your customers is any ways that you measuring this over time to see making improvements?

Jenny CampbellYeah, we get, we look at things like and seat utilization, utilization and the speed at which they get 100% utilization, and then the usage of their actual users. So you know, that gets to be 30 days, we know they bought 10 licenses, and only six of those focuses us right there at 60%. utilization, we want to get that up to, to closer to 100. Or if we're coming up in the 30 days. And we know that they have both Salesforce and Marketa on their hubs in Salesforce market on their tech stack, but they're not yet integrated, we have programs in place to try to drive those integrations, but we're really looking at are the users and the account actually using and consuming the data on a regular basis. So not just that they log in once and then not again, for two months, we want to see regular and consistent patterns of usage throughout the whole account. And if not, then that flags us to be able to proactively go back to the customer. So it might not be at you know, 30 or 60 or 90 days, it's just Hey, we see that, you know, you have six users that haven't logged in in 30 days, or, hey, we noticed that you now have market on your tech stack. Let's talk about getting integrated, or I noticed these users are not adopting the platform at the same rate that some other users are listening about getting them into some additional training.

Andrew MichaelNice. So you just really trying to keep the regular pulse of how their account is doing. When it comes to the overall the experience through the onboarding, like, is that something that's evolving, as you learning about the customers more and more and sort of how do you go about making changes to the onboarding itself? So you might retroactively see you It hasn't been so effective with one customer? But is this sort of things? Are you checking the experience over time to sort of see, okay, like we've made some additions or changes to it. And this has really had a big impact in that overall adoption of the individual accounts.

Jenny CampbellAbsolutely. I think one of the things that's been that has helped most dramatically in this last year, since we rolled it out is the motion that I walked you through as it related to the kickoff where we collect all the information from the Cust customer really understand their use case, because what that actually means is that when the learning and development manager gets on the phone to train the customer, that the training field, and actually is very customized based on that customers use case. I think, you know, if I look back to how we did this three years ago, I would say our training moments during onboarding may have been a little bit more generic, right across the board, they wouldn't have taken as much as they do now things into consideration, what size of the company and in particular, what is their use case? Who do I have on the phone? Am I talking to a good witness the ours and my talking to marketing ops folks, whatever that looks like so that the training and the enablement is actually really customized based on that company's particular use case. So we have a rapidly growing and scaling learning and development group that is purely focused on understanding customers use case and helping them get the full value for the platform based on their use case.

Andrew MichaelVery nice. So like really trying to dive into the specifics of how you can help each individual customer, each individual segments of customers get value.

Jenny CampbellSo the other thing I would say, from an onboarding perspective that we've really improved on last year, it's just our youth are tracking around onboarding, so that we can see things like, you know, how quickly are we getting customers to the kickoff stage and the integration phase and the training phase and really having controls in place and, and visibility into metrics that allow us to see that in real time. So we know, you know, where things might be slipping through the cracks, and we can so we're constantly making refinements based on okay. And every week we track you know, what percentage of our customers are getting trained in this first 30 days. And we watch that percentage every week so we can see how it's trending. And if it's trending down, then obviously we need to go in and then make some tweaks.

Andrew MichaelAnd I said, Are you using sort of any other metrics successor to NPS to measure the effectiveness?

Jenny CampbellWe are starting to use our support team is using seaside and we are just starting to dabble I would sit here and MPs. Our rollout of MPs so far has been has been fairly light. As we you know, we we serve up an MPs questions, question as soon as the customers is done with onboarding. We are in the process of rolling out a much more robust MPs program program that allows us to interact with both engaged and unengaged users and accounts and at various points in their life cycle. So we can start seeing sort of a better view of how MPs is trending based on those factors, as opposed to just sort of like point in time measurement. Yeah. So we have a we have a dedicated resource on our team now, that is going to be exclusively focused over the next six or eight months for rolling out a more robust MPs program.

Jenny Campbellit's something that we've just, yeah, something we wanted to do for a really long time. We know it's important, and we've just been a little bit resource constrained for that, you know, area, particularly. So I'm really excited that we can we can put a big focus on it now.

Andrew MichaelYeah. And let's flip the switch a little bit and go on to the other side, like after onboarding, maybe talk about renewals a little bit? And how do you see renewals or discover or what's your process like around that?

Jenny CampbellYeah, absolutely. So we're going to go a little bit of an evolution here, that I can walk you through that may give a little bit more context to the way that we that we think about renewals. So historically, at at discover org, when, when a new customer came on, they were assigned a customer success manager, and that customer success manager was responsible for everything related to that account. So they were not only the main point of contact for the account, making sure that they were getting as much value as possible. But they were also tasked with the revenue associated with that account. So that could be you know, upsell revenue, or renewal revenue. So they were really doing everything for an account. And when we acquired zoom info back in February, they had I've been operating under a slightly different model for six or so months. And their model was, was that when a customer came on board, they were given a customer success manager, and that that person was truly a customer success manager. So they were not revenue focused at all, they do not carry quotas, nothing like that they were strictly focused on helping the customer achieve the business results that they wanted to achieve. And then they had a layer of account managers that were more revenue focused and was like an eight would be right. Identifying upsell opportunities, and then handling renewal transactions and getting customers to renew. We are in the process of applying that model company. Why now. So actually, starting next Monday, Monday, we're launching a new model where when customers go come on board, they will be given a customer success manager. And then there will be a layer of account managers that are focused on revenues, our customer success managers are focused exclusively on customer health. And interestingly enough, logo, logo renewal, and the account managers are focused on that retention

Andrew Michaelmakes a lot of sense. And something that's come up as well in the podcasts, few other companies, I think we spoke to keep trucking. Recently as well, a very similar approach, we're really trying to preserve the relationship between the customer success manager and the company. And then really having the sort of key focus on revenue.

Jenny CampbellWhat we found was, you know, is that when we had so, you know, we're a fast growing company, when we had one team of resources, managing our accounts that were in charge, you know, also tasked with revenue, our net retention numbers have always been really, really strong. And what that was actually masking a little bit that we didn't see up until about 12, or 18 months ago was that, even though our net retention, so financially, everything was really strong, or low renewal rates had been pretty flat for a couple of years, they were going down, but they had been pretty flat. And so now as a business, what we're really focused on is getting those logo renewal rates up. And so with this new model, you have the customer success team, if they are driving towards healthy customers that are more likely to renew, we should start to see those logo relate those logo renewal rates increased. And so you just have two teams focused on those two different metrics.

Andrew MichaelYeah, I really like that sin, it's sort of a secondary clear distinction in terms of when you're thinking about general retention, having that separation between like a sales more sales role, and the more customer successful between logo and Mr. retention. And it really gives you a clear picture in terms of like what they're trying to achieve as team members.

Jenny CampbellAbsolutely, I will say, you know, discover org, we have always prided ourselves on being a fairly lean mean organization and running hyper efficiently. And so when we first went women, when we saw that they had this customer success and account manager role, we work to be honest, totally open to it at first, because it's obviously not as efficient, right, you have more body bodies managing every account. And so that just makes, you know, things less efficient. But we did see is with that model, they got significant list and both net retention and logo retention. And so it has opened our eyes to a just a new way of looking at things and realizing that, you know, you can make some efficiency compromises that are actually in the long run, not going to be compromises at all, because your logo renewal rates, and your net retention rates are likely to go up with more more resources, focus on accounts, and particularly to your point resources that are exclusively focused on helping the customers get the business value.

Andrew MichaelYeah, I love that as well. Because it's typically like one of the things in customer success. It's one of those things too hard to justify, as well like to expand that and grow the resources. Because it's not one of those ones, we see the immediate ROI. But you have this unique perspective of having this acquisition where it's been operated from two different perspectives and seeing like, actually what the impact is of it. Yeah, have you been in the music are the interesting things that you've noticed between now between the two companies, as you going forward with this merger when it comes to churn and retention that you've found interesting.

Jenny CampbellAnd, you know, I think what we, what we, what we saw is that we were, you know, they were our biggest competitor for a long time, or certainly in the last couple of years. And so it's interesting, what you what you think the company is, when you're competing against them. And then when you become one team, you realize that, you know, you're all, you're all kind of the same. And the The interesting thing about zoom info is because they're offering what had been slightly different than ours, their database was much larger, their total addressable market was actually significantly larger than ours, because they could just sell to more companies. And so we'd have had to think about in the acquisition, how do we continue to like, integrate and structure teams, to not only try to penetrate a larger market and discover org We had thought about before, but actually supporting customers across a much larger market than we ever had. So we were doing some work on, you know, our how do we look at the way that we segment our customers, even further further than we then we have before, there are some best practices that we had been doing it discover org related to how we segment customers. So based on size and growth, which was quite different than the way that zoom info they were territory based. And so going forward, we are going to adopt the model that discovery had been using based on company size and growth, yet, zoom info, they had been using the account manager and customer success manager model that now we are adopting across the organization. So we really been able to over the last six or seven months, dive in and really figure out what has worked really well in both organizations, and adopt those for our go to market teams, and frankly, for the rest of the organization, but to really kind of optimize our structure for our go to market teams, as we, you know, head into q3 and q4.

Andrew MichaelAnd picking up like the best of both worlds. Yep. What has been the biggest challenge throughout this process now and dealing with the merger that you'd say, up until now?

Jenny CampbellYou know, it's we had a couple years, before we acquired some info we had acquired what was at that time, our biggest competitor to the market, which was, which was, which was ranking. And so we have gone through this before. And we had come out the other side we had integrated and but going into the opposition, it just felt different because they were of equal size to us from both the revenue and headcount perspective. And they were doing really well, right, they were doing really, really, really well. And so, as a business, we had to figure out from day one at the point of acquisition, we're bringing together two very healthy, fast growing companies. And how do you move through an integration like that without disrupting any of the business? Right? Because you can't we can't say, Okay, well, we just acquired a company. And so you know, we're going to have a couple of months where we may not hit our targets or growth is going to slow down. None of those were options on the table. So we had to move very swiftly from an integration perspective, understanding, you know, how the business works, how are the team structure and figuring out what does the phase plan look like so that we can integrate these two companies that he size become 1000 person company, while still achieving or exceeding our targets, as an organization without skipping a beat, and we've been able to do that, which has been really fun to be a part of, and frankly, I think very impressive, that we've been able to been able to do that. We are at the point now, where we are fully integrated, right, we have one set of go to market teams, all departments are fully integrated. And we really are, in fact, this past Monday, we had a big, you know, company wide celebration around the fact that we are one team now. And so seeing that happened over the last six months has been has been pretty incredible to watch. But mostly because we have not skipped a beat our growth has been just as it always was. And we tell our read revenue targets and retention targets and things like that, so that the teams have really pushed themselves to, to get through it without compromising anything along the way.

Andrew MichaelIt's absolutely incredible. And I think like often in startups and fostering startups, you think like growth of 30 4050 people in the space of six months is what but doubling headcount from 500 to over 1000. And some missing a bit is is definitely super impressive.

Jenny CampbellIt hasn't been easy.

Andrew MichaelSo I'm interested to hear a little bit about sec, what are some interesting ways to discover August using discover org?

Jenny CampbellOh, yeah, well, we, we have always, you know, we are a sales driven company. And so we have always, you know, as they say, eating our own dog food on our teams, our sales and marketing and operations team, use both discover org and zoom info data, all day, every day to feed all their sales and prospecting efforts to keep our database clean in the same way that our customers do and to feed to feed marketing campaigns. And we have also made some other acquisitions over the last couple of years, we acquired a company called never bounce, which is an email verification company. So that's really helped from a data cleansing perspective, as well. But our our teams, and all of our go to market teams until the marketing and us discover the data from discover Oregon Sumit. And so every single day, all day, every day, we can expect those are our customers to use it. And, and frankly, it is what fuels our sales and marketing efforts. Right. It is absolutely the lifeblood of all of our prospecting and, and marketing and, and, and also from our from a customer service success perspective as well. So, you know, we encourage our customers to think about using our data, surely from BX to acquire new customers sales and marketing, but also from a customer management perspective. But it's really important for us to understand what is happening at our own customers to help better serve them, right? Are they going through transitions? Are they adding or dropping technologies? And what does that mean for the way that they use our data? Are they going through their own mergers and acquisitions? Are they getting additional levels of funding, so we use our own data from, you know, we have scoop data and intent data that we use every day to help us keep tabs on our customers? as well as internally, we use our we have a feature on our platform called org charts, which is just an org chart of what's happening within an organization, what is the structure look like? Who's in what position who reports to who, and that's really valuable for you know, if you have a customer that you're trying to grow or expand, certainly helping to understand what the rest of that organization looks like, but also keep helping us understand, you know, we might have a main point of contact that moves on gets another job gets let's go gets promoted, whatever. And so helping us keep track of those the word and never in a position where, you know, we have a main point of contact, walk out the door, and we don't know who to call.

Andrew MichaelYeah. fetter Lata. And it's good to see that you are not only using from a sales and marketing perspective, but found good ways to use it and customer success as well. Yeah. So maybe last question I have for you, and it's a little bit of a hypothetical scenario for today is I'd like to put you in a new role. Let's pretend you've joined a new company now. And you've come in and you've seen churn and retention is not created all within this company. And you've been tasked to try and turn things around. What are some of the things that you would want to be doing in the first two to three months of this company?

Jenny CampbellI think the very first step is understanding who your customers are really understanding who their customers are, and then starting to look at what drives a customers, you know, in your customers, what is driving a customer to stay or go or spend more right to start to really understand, what are the leading indicators, you know, the customer that tend to leave, look a certain way or have signs, you know, customers give us signals all the time, right, they give us signals that are just, you know, we know, just based on before a customer even engages with our platform, we know based on a couple of factors, what their likelihood to renew at the end of the first year is right now, the other factors get on to really understanding who are who are your customers? And then diving into what what are those signals that the customers send us along the way that help us understand how healthy they are, how happy they are, and how likelihood they are to renew. And then you just kind of double down on those findings, right? You build. You build teams, and you structure teams, and you you try to find insights, that help you manage those customers along the way so that you can you understand what do you see a signal, that's a not not a good one, and you have teams in place to deal to try to change the outcome. And then you also understand what makes a really healthy, happy customer, and you build teams and programs to get more customers into that bucket. But I think what happens and we were in a position a couple years ago, is we just looked at stats at the end of the year, and we're like, gosh, our retention rates for our SMB segment are not great. And then you spend a bunch of time diagnosing that, we just have sped up that cycle. And we do all of that in real time. Now, so we do it every single month, we we look at our stats, and we look at how our leading indicators every single month did or did not help us determine what those final outcomes at the end of the month we're going to be. And then we make real time adjustments to the programs, and the teams that are part of that. So it's a for us, it's it's data, data data, we really, really have to understand and I would do the same thing over with any other company, I would start to dive in and understand all the customers as best as possible. That's customers that are with you and customers that are no longer with you try to start under stand what those leading indicators are, and then you and then you just you build teams. And you know, for us, it's it's optimization, we change stuff all the time, we are not afraid to pivot to change, to evolve to optimize based on real time findings. And we move really fast. So we have to be nimble enough to do that. But I think, you know, if we were a slower organization, we would, oh, this is interesting. And then six months later, you sort of do something about it, we pretty much operate in real time. And I think you need to be able to move fast to be able to impact those outcomes immediately.

Andrew MichaelAbsolutely. So yeah, definitely. So what you're saying is, was that really get to the bottom of understanding who your users are, what the pain points are, and then moving really, really fast to change and adapt and help serve them better. I mentioned before was the Last question, but I had one more. One more. bit off the back of this is your list. What is one thing that you wish you could do today, but you just haven't got to when it comes to trying to tackle churn and retention your company and maybe just your priorities or resources. But one thing that you that's on your radar that you want to be testing you want to be trying out, but you just haven't got around to it.

Jenny CampbellWhy would say that was my wish, but my wishes about to come true, because my wish has been for a long time to, to to go to market with this structure that I had been describing, where you have Customer Success managers that are focused solely on helping customers achieve their their business results. And that wishes coming true for me because we are in the process of launching that model. And I'm going to be lucky enough to lead the customer success organization as part of that part of that effort. But I think, you know, the, the the constant wish, I guess is is being having being able to control the teams. And when I say control, I mean that control of of optimizing the teams that you know are going to have the biggest impact. And I think for us, the biggest impact is going to be putting more more resources, more bodies more more folks in the customer relationship that are solely focused on the success of that customer revenue is important. We always need the revenue groups, we always need groups that are going to make sure customer renews and that we sell them more. But our job is to really keep up that motion for those sales folks. So that you know, then renewal becomes a no brainer. And so I have to be really focused on health happiness, and what value are our customers getting from day one, so that, you know, when it's month 11. And they're faced with making a renewal decision. It's just, it's just a no brainer right now. Yep. And that's what we're driving to. So I would say my wishes My wish is actually has actually come true. Now we just need the pressure of approving it out. But I feel like we are, we are better position than we ever have to, to make the impact that we know we've needed for a long time. And we're finally positioned to do it in a way that I think is going to have the biggest impact.

Andrew MichaelVery cool. Yeah, I love this or like that focus in the deep dive of really just trying to focus on making your customer successful, because at the end of the day, then sales almost becomes redundant. They're giving them value of seeing it again, stick around. So, Jenny, it's been a pleasure having you on the show today. And before we go, is there anything you'd like to leave the audience with? Like maybe how they could keep up to date with yourself or with discover or anything that you'd like to point them towards?

Jenny CampbellYeah, absolutely. So um, you know, keep an eye out for discover Oregon and, and zoom info, you're, I think you'll see a lot more of us. If you're not already a customer. Check us out for your sales and marketing, and, and recruiting teams. I personally, I love just kind of talking about churn and retention and customer experience. So you know, I love to make connections on LinkedIn. I'm Jenny Campbell on LinkedIn. And I love talking to people, other people in the space and sharing ideas. So please reach out to me, and I'd love to have those conversations.

Andrew MichaelAwesome. Well, thanks very much for joining today, Jenny, it's been really a pleasure to hear how things are going over discover all the explosive growth that you've seen how you managing to continue that growth now during this big merger, and really having that core focus around your customer and on their success. So I think I wish you best of luck now as you go forward and as your wishes starting to come true. So Best of luck.

Andrew MichaelRight. And that's a wrap for the show today with me, Andrew, Michael. I really hope you enjoyed it and you able to pull out something valuable for your business. To keep up to date with turned on FM, and be notified about new episodes, blog posts and more. Subscribe to our mailing list by visiting churn.fm. Also, don't forget to subscribe to our show on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you listen to your podcasts. If you have any feedback good or bad, I would love to hear from you. And you can provide your direct feedback by sending it to andrew@churn.fm. Lastly, but most importantly, if you enjoyed this episode, please share it and leave a review as it really helps get the word out and grow the community. Thanks again for listening. See you again next week.

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The show

My name is Andrew Michael and I started CHURN.FM, as I was tired of hearing stories about some magical silver bullet that solved churn for company X.

In this podcast, you will hear from founders and subscription economy pros working in product, marketing, customer success, support, and operations roles across different stages of company growth, who are taking a systematic approach to increase retention and engagement within their organizations.